I minded that near-strangers would ask, perhaps to fill a gossip quotient, maybe idle chatter, or maybe they really did care.
I did not want to have cancer and I did not want to have had cancer, and I did not want everyone to ask me about cancer because I was sure I was OK. Yes, I was sure I was OK. And it was my breast, for goodness sake, not my big toe. Stop asking about my boob. Just a little cancer. I am Cancer Woman, no, Used to Have Cancer Woman. No More Cancer Woman. Wait, that sounds final. It was just a little, teeny eeny weeny cancer, the size of a thumbnail. Stage 1, not so bad. Invasive, that’s not good, but stage 1, no nodes.
I didn’t want anybody to know; yes, I was pretty sure I didn’t want anybody to know. Then again maybe I wanted everybody to know so then maybe they could worry about it for me and I wouldn’t have to.
Fireworks of pain shot through my left breast, and the left side under my arm was sore and swollen. Dr. Dowlat said it would hurt for a while and gave me painkillers I was afraid to take.
“Don’t be a martyr,” my brother-in-law Mike, who is a doctor, said. “If it hurts, take the pills.”
I could keep going. I couldn’t slow down. I kept working because if I didn’t keep working it meant, well, it meant I was going to die. Busy people didn’t die. I had boys to raise, I had students to teach. The cancer was gone, I was dutifully doing everything they said to do. I would not die. I could not die. Sam I am. I am Sam. I was trying so hard to pretend it was all normal, while I was screaming on the inside that it was not. I couldn’t concentrate for long stretches. Because over and over in my head like a mantra, I asked myself: Where else is there cancer?
In the hour ride to campus from my house, I kept the bag of ice on my breast—ten minutes on, ten minutes off; bag on at North Avenue, bag off at Cicero, bag on at the Edens Expressway, bag off at Dempster. It wasn’t so bad with the ice. I listened to the Rolling Stones and tried to think about the new courses coming up and how they would work, how they had never been tried before at this level, and what I needed to get done before January.
Mick Jagger was an old man and he was still rocking. Keith Richards might live forever.
That first week of the winter quarter I would stand in the lecture hall with all new material. I would stand there with my tamoxifen-generated mood swings and hot flashes, a hole in my chest where the cancer used to be and a closed, bullet-hole scar where the radiation tube had been, pretending everything was dandy. Cancer was one thing. Teaching alone unprepared before two hundred eighteen-year-olds for an hour and a half in a mandatory class was quite another.
I felt as if I was swimming in glue.
“I don’t feel like myself,” I told Colin later.
“Who do you feel like?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer.
My shapeless, dark-colored sweater concealed the bag with enough ice to cool a very small keg. But it was starting to leak. Just before I walked into the faculty conference room, I took the ice off. I later placed it on the floor beside my chair; I could excuse myself in case the pain increased and stick it under my sweater.
When I walked into the room, five of my colleagues applauded. It was OK they knew; I was grateful.
“This is the first time in a month I have been to a meeting where I kept my shirt on,” I said. I knew as soon as it came out of my mouth it was a dumb thing to say.
But when you have cancer—and I imagine most any other disease as well—the separation of the personal sphere from the medical arena involves such a pervasive and thorough disruption of your privacy, you get confused. Mostly it’s because you feel as if you are evicted from your own life.
You initially were red-faced and embarrassed when someone new saw you half-naked in the offices of the oncologist, surgeon, or radiologist. But after you did it so often you expected to be topless in front of every person you met. Nice to meet you, want to take a peek?
“So you teach journalism?” the resident asked the first time I met him after radiation. He was trying to make small talk, I gather practicing his bedside manner on topless cancer patients. “My roommate just graduated from there in the master’s program.”
“What’s his name?” I asked, pretending this wasn’t incredibly awkward.
He told me. I knew him. He would go home that night and tell his friend about Professor Weldon’s breasts.
I began teaching journalism as an adjunct ten years earlier when I was freshly divorced. I had a cinematically romantic notion of what it meant to be a college professor. I thought the whole scenario would resemble Goodbye Mr. Chips, Wonder Boys, or even Dead Poets Society. I would engage impossibly bright, grateful, and eager students who would hang on my every syllable, taking notes on all my comments and nodding in agreement, calling their parents to remark on my brilliance and insight and how grateful they were to be in my class. They would quote me years later when they won awards. They would all like me.
When Julia Roberts played a college professor in Mona Lisa Smile, I thought, there, that could be me. Every part of my life was mimicked in at least one scene of every Julia Roberts movie, and most of them have happy endings. You befriended your students who emulated you and whom you inspired to achieve greatness; that was rewarding. You could do all that while looking amazing. And when the spring quarter of the school year was over, I would relax all summer, doing something intellectually stimulating that would further my career. Write more books and articles, give more speeches. Then in September, I would do it all over again. I wouldn’t ever burn out. I would never have a bad day.
It wasn’t exactly like that. No, really not at all.
I saw myself in the young women who sought my advice and I saw my sons in the young men who asked for recommendations and sometimes told me jokes after class. I expected to connect to them all in a way that rewarded us both because I liked them all even before I met them, just by seeing their fresh names full of possibility on the roster, their photographs so innocent and promising. Every quarter I was determined to make this their favorite class ever, align myself with their trajectories, guarantee their successes, show them what I knew, help them every way I could. Help them meet their goals, their dreams. Be their Julia Roberts.
Teaching was more work than I imagined in my fantasy, definitely more work than I had done in a magazine or newspaper newsroom or as a freelancer juggling magazine, newspaper, and any other writing and speaking assignments I could land. For every one hour of lecture, I could do at least ten and more likely twenty hours of preparation. Most of the faculty did that. Aside from the hours of research for every class, it was the grading that could do you in, six or more hours a day to edit lab and homework assignments—and the scores of hourly e-mails that demanded immediate action. The committee meetings, the advising sessions, the faculty meetings, the mandatory meetings when someone of note or newsworthiness came to campus, the lunches in the dean’s office with the same sandwiches every time, the favors from colleagues in other parts of the university, the feedback sessions, the lectures of friends, the lectures of visiting authors, the announcement of new procedures, the announcements of ended traditions. There was a parade of new deans—more than a half dozen over the years, each one with his (always his) agenda and peccadilloes, favorites, and danger zones. New turf to navigate. New rules to ingest and obey.
There were the colleagues you shared birthdays with and the secretaries who made you laugh and brought you Christmas gifts. There were also colleagues who did not respond when you said hello in the hall. Colleagues in meetings who countered whatever you said.
And there were the course and teacher evaluations filled out online that included, “I hate her chunky bracelets,” “Her voice is annoying in the morning,” and my all-time favorite, “She teaches us too much.” Of course many of the comments were gratifying, but there were always hate-filled comments about what I wore, my feminism, or that I should be despised because I had age spots on my face.
Still, it was an undeniably good gig. Teachi
ng at what we considered the best journalism school in the country at one of the top universities in the world. Great benefits. Retirement plan. Dental! Vision! View of the lake from the parking garage and the classrooms in the buildings where I taught. Coffee in the faculty lounge. Smart women friends. Big ideas, always talking about big ideas to change the world. A top administration that felt open and warm and encouraging. Professors and adjuncts and researchers you met at cross-disciplinary functions who were blindingly bright and also trying to manage their roles in the universe.
And for your part in the whole equation, you did what was asked, you did what was expected. You never said no. You contemplated what new, inspiring lesson to teach every second, how to improve your approach, and you stayed awake nights thinking about how to help improve students’ writing and reporting, what you could do or say to make it go well.
You ignored the white-haired male colleagues who snored or snarled in faculty meetings—and that was definitely the majority—who objected to every new idea, even the name change for the school. And you ignored the mean woman who smirked when you commented in a meeting. It was OK because you were smart enough to sit near the people you liked in the group meetings and the convocations and the lunches and the presentations, the people like you who worked hard and cared about the students and the quality of the content, the journalists who were still committing journalism, not just talking about it, the ones with the book deals, the documentaries in the works, the new sites, the side gigs, and the excitement about all that was new in media and the world. There were enough of them to make it fun.
I learned that some quarters the teaching was more difficult than others, and that most times I could divide a large lecture class into thirds. All the students were very intelligent; it was the attitudes and approaches that varied widely along this triptych.
A third of the students were every professor’s dream—ambitious, polite, energetic, eager, respectful, very advanced in their skills and abilities. Another third were ambitious and respectful, newly exposed to the skills needed, but eager to learn. Another third were what academics call strategic learners, who cared principally about the grade and what it took to get the grade they wanted. Some students would come to my office and argue over a single point on a grammar or current events quiz, even though it was one point out of four hundred possible points in the course. We would go over the student’s concerns, I would show him or her the page number of the correct answer, and the student would still ask for credit. These students, at any given moment, any hour of any day, wanted an answer right now, right now, even if they e-mailed me at 3 AM on a Tuesday.
“You never answer me until Sunday when I e-mail you on Saturday, and I do my homework on Saturday,” one student chastised me in an e-mail. Another told me in an e-mail the quiz was too “fucking hard.”
It struck me as odd that it never occurred to some students that a professor would have a life, his or her own children, problems, concerns—heck, cancer. That sometimes we walked up to the podium out of a complicated life.
Sure, most were not that way. Many more students from India to Indiana made me want to call their parents and say what a good job they did raising smart, curious, and respectful people with ambition, talent, and humility. I got to do that at graduation—meet their parents—and promised to stay in touch while they took pictures of me with their children on their digital cameras under the white tents that housed enormous strawberries, the red punch, and the small cucumber-and-turkey sandwiches. With many of the students I felt deeply responsible for their initiation into the profession, for helping them love storytelling, for helping them become writers. They hugged me at the start of every quarter, brought me small gifts, mementos from a study abroad quarter.
There were former students from as far back as my first year of teaching who called and e-mailed me with news of new jobs, new accomplishments, awards, life events, even heartaches. A few invited me to their weddings. To be electively included in their circle of friends and mentors was an honor, because that was their choice. They did not have a choice in choosing me as their professor; I taught the “vegetable classes,” the required fundamental skills classes in their major, not the “cake” classes of the electives with ten or sixteen upper graduate students, the seminars, the independent studies. But for some of them, after they finished the course, years later, they did choose me.
The truth is, it is a lot of fun to stand in front of a group of students and talk about ideas and to get them to talk back, engage, and demonstrate what they learn. And to do it at a university you respect and feel loyalty to—real loyalty, not just I am here for the time being loyalty, but a place you care about deeply. And it is rewarding to feel for about ten seconds at a time that you are Julia Roberts, even if you have chunky bracelets some hate and age spots you yourself are not so particularly fond of, right there on your face for everyone to see.
11
Radiation
* * *
November 2006
“You have beautiful hair,” she said when I took off my hat and placed my purse and briefcase on a couch near her in the waiting area. I hung up my coat and stuffed my hat and scarf in one sleeve. “I lost all my hair,” she explained and gestured to her paisley headscarf.
“I like your scarf,” I said.
“Today is my birthday. I’m seventy-six.”
“Happy birthday.” I want to be seventy-six. I didn’t know if I should keep talking or ask more questions. I wasn’t sure exactly what radiation treatment waiting room protocol was.
Should we all exchange cancer stories, prognoses, recurrence likelihood percentages? Are cancer jokes OK? Is this where we cheer each other loudly or silently pretend everyone in the room is not obsessed with measuring the odds?
This was my first time. But it already felt different than a regular doctor’s office; more like a block party without the cocktails and food. At the front desk the staff was remarkably effusive, as if they were greeters at a health club or Walmart, smiling as they checked off your name and handed you a parking pass to put on your dashboard so you could park close to the automatic sliding door off the circular drive. No one was ever in a bad mood here; they were on the safe side of cancer.
A dozen or so other patients looked up from crossword puzzles or magazines and away from the morning show on the mounted television and wished her a happy birthday. A man in his sixties or seventies, neatly dressed in dark pants and a cardigan sweater, strolled in, stood in the center of the room with his back to the flat-screen TV, waved a broad sweep of hello, and boomed, “Good morning, how is everyone today?” as if he was Norm and this was the bar in Cheers.
“Good, great,” was the chorus’s response. No one replied, “OK, except for the cancer.”
He hung up his gray parka, poured black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and helped himself to two of the sugar cookies in an open tin before sitting down with the newspaper he carried under his arm.
The waiting area was the size of a motel lobby, the sort of motel you stay in for just one night for a business meeting or a stopover on a long drive to somewhere else, a sixty-nine-dollar-a-night spot you see in the Midwest with the packaged dairy creamer and no wireless connections. The coffeemaker was always on and a microwave sat beside stacks of brochures for local water parks, ranches with hourly horseback riding lessons, antique shops, and wax museums.
I was the youngest person in the waiting room that morning, but still much older than the medical residents who walked briskly in and out of the room, their white lab coats crisp, their hands in their pockets, their expressions pensive.
“Jeez, some of these people look really sick,” Paul whispered to me. He had picked me up for my first morning radiation treatment. “You look pretty good in comparison.”
This building in the massive hospital complex was called the Woman’s Board Cancer Treatment Center and thankfully not Outpatient Center/Nuclear Medicine, where I had gone for an earlier test. Nuclear was not
an adjective you want in any part of your medical treatment. I remembered the news stories in 1979 of Love Canal and saw Silkwood twice, mostly because I couldn’t believe Cher could actually act. This radiation was serious business; only a week earlier news reports announced that Alexander Litvinenko, the former member of the Russian Federal Security Service, had died with the diagnosis of “acute radiation syndrome,” a deliberate poisoning from polonium-210. I was almost positive I was not getting polonium. Palladium was what I was getting; that was different.
At Dr. Dowlat’s suggestion, I would be having internal radiation at 9:50 in the morning and 4:30 in the afternoon every day for five days, compared to traditional external radiation therapy once daily for six to seven weeks; that burned your skin. Internal radiation treatments needed to be six to seven hours apart; staff gave those morning and late-afternoon times to accommodate patients who were working. That way we could work between treatments.
The senior director of the undergraduate program got me an office to work in at the university’s downtown law school and continuing studies campus in between treatments. That way I would not have to drive from treatment on the near South Side all the way up north and back—about fifteen miles each way.
She got me space in a lecturer’s office with a radiator that hissed aggressively and a view of the lake if you strained your neck. I drove there after the morning session, parked in the Neiman Marcus building, and walked through the first floor, spraying samples of delicious perfumes on my arms and neck.
I was thinking maybe it would be nice to go home and lie down in between treatments, but maybe the senior director was right—it was better to be busy. I did have to work on the curriculum.
The kind of radiation I was having, internal brachytherapy, had only been available after FDA approval for breast cancer treatment for four years. More than thirty thousand breast cancer patients had had this form of radiation, one of the pamphlets read, this one with a large pink tulip on the cover as if it was an ad for Miracle-Gro. The brochure resembled the flyer I got in middle school health class on menstruation, making the process seem so feminine and pretty and benign.
Escape Points Page 10